September 21st, 2009

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers’ findings appear in an article published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science.

November 15th, 2008

October 17th, 2008

A six minute movie depicting “A Summary of Life, the Universe, and Everything”.

Inspired by Richard Dawkin’s best-selling book, The Ancestor’s Tale cinematically documents the evolution of life and the origiens of humans. Through selecting key events in the past, this film displays a passion for the scientific principles of evolution and optimism at human innovation.

August 19th, 2008

A podcast service consisting of 2 minute programs which tackles all sorts of scientific subjects presented as questions and answers like “How big a stick would you need to measure the planet?” or “Problems with turning yourself invisible”.

You can listen to their podcasts here or download their audio files here. You can also read their transcripts here.

They allow the listener to add to the list of subjects by sending questions to amos [at] indiana.edu which makes this service very beneficial.

May 13th, 2008

One of the most common sleazy tricks used by various sorts of denialists comes back to statistics – invalid and deceptive sampling methods. In fact, the very first real post on the original version of this blog was a shredding of a paper by Mark and David Geier that did this.